For the past year or so I’ve made it possible for you guys to support the podcast by making donations.

As a way of giving a little something back to those of you kind enough to do so, I decided to produce some subscriber-only bonus content such as the Quick Fire Question’s portion of my interviews and hosting some AMA (Ask Me Anything) episodes.

In order to make this content exclusively available to paying subscribers, I had to set up a membership section on the website which kept bonus content hidden by requiring members to sign-in in order to view it.

There are various options available to implement such functionality, but without boring you with too much technical minutiae, in short, most solutions didn’t suit my requirements, and the few that did are simply too expensive or too complicated to implement.

For the past few months I’ve been plodding along with a free solution that I cobbled together myself using a selection of freely available WordPress plugins. However, it soon became evident why such a Frankensteinian approach was free.

Firstly, it required a lot manual input on my part. Secondly, reliability was poor as there were a ton of bugs and compatibility issues.

Despite all the difficulties, as of last week enough of you guys had pledged monthly donations that we were about 60% of the way to making the podcast break even financially, and thus well on the way to becoming completely self-sustainable.

However, despite this progress, as some of you may have noticed, the frequency of my output has decreased a little over the past couple of month; a direct result of all the extra time required to manually implement and maintain this rickety membership functionality.

Since the whole point of enabling you guys to support the podcast is so that I can spend more time producing content for you, it becomes completely counterproductive when maintaining such a system takes up so much time that I struggle to produce more content as a result.

So this week, I’ve taken the difficult and costly, but more sustainable decision to scrap the self-hosted membership option, cancel everybody’s subscriptions, and make the shift over to Patreon.

Patreon, for those of you who aren’t familiar, is a membership platform that makes it easy for a people to support the creators whose content they enjoy and in return gain access to various subscriber-only perks.

It’s everything I was doing before, only they deal with all the payment processing, membership sign-ups, and providing you with access to the subscriber-only bonus material, while I just concentrate on the task of producing content.

I know it’s a pain in the arse signing-up to yet another website, but for those of you willing to do so, I promise to make it worthwhile.

I currently offer four different subscriber tiers at $2, $3, $5, and $10 per month. The more you pledge, the more perks you gain access to, including:

Bonus content from the podcast

Members-only newsletter

My AMA (Ask Me Anything) episodes

Live Events

Access to our private Facebook Group

Sponsorship credit

So for those of you who have supported me so far, thank you so much for you support. If I see you on the other side, awesome! If not, I hope you continue to enjoy the podcast regardless.